Alciato's Book of
Emblems

Emblem 50

Deceit against one's own

A duck fattened as a lure, with feathers of blue, used to come and go to
her masters. Seeing numbers of her own kind flying through the air, she
quacks, and slips into a flock of them, until she leads the ususpecting
birds beneath the nets spread out for them. The captive birds cry out, but
the accomplice herself is silent. The treacherous bird has defiled herself
with the blood of her kin. Obliging to others, deadly to her own.